What Was in the First Americans' Toolkit?

A new study provides the strongest evidence yet of a North American civilization older than the famed Clovis people, based on stone tools that appear to date back 15,500 years. According to study leader Mike Waters, these ancient people were pretty handy: They could have used the tools he discovered to paint, cut leather, glue wood to stone and more.

It's a Texas treasure trove. Buried in the ground outside Austin in a place called Buttermilk Creek Valley, professor Mike Waters of Texas A&M University and his team have found more than 50 well-formed tools and thousands of incomplete artifacts that they dated back more than 15,000 years. According to Waters' research, published today in Science, this is the strongest evidence ever unearthed that predates the Clovis culture—a 13,000-year-old technological culture that was at one time considered to be the first in North America.

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But what was a toolkit like 15,000 years ago? Surprisingly sophisticated, Waters tells PM.

Blades

Among the many pieces of chert (a type of sedimentary rock) that showed obvious signs of shaping by human toolmakers, Waters' team found what archaeologists call blades and bladelets—long, slender flakes of rock at least twice as long as they are wide. Waters, the director of Texas A&M's Center for the Study of the First Americans, says there are so many in the site that they wouldn't be shards created from another project, but intentionally created tools.

Under a microscope, Waters says, he saw on the blades a pattern of polish and scratches that suggests the people were cutting soft material. "Leatherworking comes to mind," he says. "So they might be making bags; they might be making clothing; they might be making a backpack or a pouch." The team members manufactured their own blades of chert to test this idea, and in the experiment the tools worked like a charm. "It's just like an Exacto knife," he says.

In addition, the excavation turned up a piece of chert that looks like a little boring tool, which Waters says could've been useful for punching holes in hides to sew pieces together.

Chisels

Just like Clovis people, the pre-Clovis people who left tools in the Texas find appear to have used lots of bifaces—an archaeological term for simple two-sided multipurpose knives. They could have used the knives for digging, hunting, or a variety of other purposes. But sometimes, Waters says, it seems that the people smashed them.

"Imagine they put that biface on the table and they just smashed it right in the middle to break it into a bunch of little pieces, like pieces of pie," he says. Those shards often have a nice sharp chisel end, he says, which the pre-Clovis people could have used to work hard materials. "These people were probably making handles for tools, or [wanted] to groove something to insert maybe a blade or a scraper tool into the wooden handle. They could've been shaping bone to a point to make a bone projectile."

Paint or Glue

"I'll never forget this," Waters says: "This undergraduate student was digging and he called me over and said, 'Dr. Waters, I found this shiny stone, you should come look at this.' So I looked at it and said, 'Yeah, holy smokes, you found a shiny stone.'"

That stone was a golf-ball-size piece of the mineral hematite, which has a red ochre color. If the pre-Clovis people ground the hematite into a powder, they could have mixed that powder with animal fat or with plant sap to create a red paint. In addition, Waters says, mixing hematite powder with some fats, oils or plant juices would create a binding agent—a glue they could have used to attach stone tools to wooden handles. "If you mixed a little bit of hematite powder in there, it helps bind that stone tool firmly to the wood," he says. "And then you wrap sinew around it and it's not going anywhere."

What We Don't See

Even before the Waters team began excavating Buttermilk Creek Valley in 2006, finding 15,000-year-old tools, Waters says new archaeological finds were poking holes in the Clovis-first theory: that people with artifacts dating back 13,000 years were the first Americans. Some archaeologists have been loath to give up on the Clovis-first idea, Waters says, partly because Clovis-era people left behind many stone tools, while these people—who appear to be their precursors, according to Waters' team—did not. Archaeologists have to take what the ground gives them, and most of the pre-Clovis culture—including perhaps clothing, baskets and shoes—didn't survive. Or, at least, scientists haven't found those artifacts yet.

"You think, 'Wow, this is a rich site, we found a lot of artifacts,'" Waters says. "But if you ever go to a dry cave in West Texas and see what's pulled out of there, what you find is that stone tools are only about 5 percent of what people had. We're only getting a glimpse of these people from the stone tools we find at the site."